Sister Norma wanted to show Trump what it is like on the border. He didn't care to listen.

To Sister Norma Pimentel, it sounded like a golden opportunity to touch the heart of a president, to give him a firsthand account of the suffering she sees every day.

The night before President Trumpís Thursday visit to McAllen, Tex., Sister Norma, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, got a call from the Border Patrol, inviting her to join the president at a roundtable discussion.

It was understandable that she would be asked to be a part of anything that purports to be a serious, high-level discussion of immigration issues along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Sister Norma is something of a local hero, loved and respected for the respite center that she runs near the McAllen bus station, working with law enforcement and an army of volunteers to help hundreds of desperate migrants every day. These people are in this country legally, most of them wearing electronic ankle monitors, as they await a court hearing on their requests for asylum.

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Sister Norma showed up as she had been instructed to do, at 11 a.m. sharp. The president arrived two hours later.

But instead of having an opportunity to speak with him as she had expected, the nun found herself sitting silently near the front of a stage-managed event featuring politicians, law enforcement representatives, a rancher and two relatives of fallen officers.

1. It's way past time to cancel the Trump show.

2. All such "demonstrations" are photo-ops.

You go to one part of the border, and it's pristine desert or mountains and nobody's around for miles.

You go to another part of the border, and there's an 18'-high corrugated barrier that's hard to get over, so nobody tries. They go 10 miles down the road to go around it.

You go to another part of the border, and it's a port of entry. For miles on either side entry is harder, so that's where people try to smuggle stuff through.

Go to another part of the border, and the barrier extends out into the ocean, making it so you can't just walk around it--yeah, you can swim. but it takes longer, it's harder to move stuff that you're carrying, and there are BP folk around to observe.

Go to another part and it's river. Actual rushing river. Another part is down to being a creek.

So, what's it like at the border? C'mon. There's one border. There can only be one "what it's like", right? That's the assumption? But, no, it's an obviously false assumption. What's it like? It's hot and humid, it's dry and desert; it's ocean, it's mountain. Some has a high wall, some has high mountains. Some is flat and maybe has the occasional marker every half mile to say "this is a border. At places, there's nobody's and others are migratory corridors with a hundred or two illegally crossing per day and yet others are busy ports of entry. What's it like at the border? Very, very diverse in description. The "blind men and the elephant" fable comes to mind.

What's funny is that "what it's like at the border" is such a straw man, yet nobody likes pointing at the scarecrow and calling it that. They're too busy trying to scare crows or protect the corn.